I think I want to be in love with you but I don’t know how.
I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.
How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.
Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!
Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can’t be ironic all the time.
Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.
The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre – the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.
Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart.
Irish was a man of parts even if some of them didn’t work too well.
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.
It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.
Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.
A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny’s house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.
I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.
They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.